Finding a good website hosting company will make your life easy. Choosing a bad host can ruin your business. Fortunately, there are numerous reputable companies offering affordable hosting for your website or app.

 

Shared Hosting vs Dedicated Hosting

Shared hosting is when you share a server with other websites. It is affordable and ideal for new sites without a great deal of traffic. It is essential you choose a host with an excellent reputation as you don’t want to share a server with a spam or phishing website. Dedicated hosting means you have your own server. It is more expensive, but necessary for high traffic sites.

 

Uptime Guarantees

Reputable website hosts over uptime guarantees. You will typically see 99.9 percent uptime guaranteed, which is excellent. Any time someone tries to access your site for the first time and it is down, they probably won’t return.

 

Performance

In addition to having your website up, you want it to load quickly. When sites take a long time to load (over three seconds), visitors become frustrated and leave. While there are many things you can optimize on your website, the host you choose impacts how fast your site loads. If a bad hosting company has too many sites on one server, it will slow down your load time. Google uses page load speed as a ranking factor so you want your site to load fast if you want it to rank well.

 

Customer Service

A reliable web host will reply promptly to customer inquiries. They should offer email, chat or phone support 24/7. If your site has a problem, you want it back up as quickly as possible.

 

Security

Trustworthy website hosting companies help keep your website secure. They should offer daily backups, which you may need to initiate. If you lose your data, it could spell disaster for your company.

If you collect customer information, you should choose a host which offers SSL certificates. While visitors only used to look for SSL certificates on e-commerce websites, now they expect them on every site. Google warns visitors about sites which are not secure, so the minuscule cost of an SSL certificate is worth it if you don’t want top lose any traffic.

 

Free Website Builder

Many hosts offer one-click installation of common content management systems, such as WordPress or Drupal. This is a time-saving feature which makes it easy for you to try different CMSs easily.

Finding a trustworthy website host can help you grow your business. You will experience good website performance, a better ranking on search engines and the security you need with a dependable host. If cost is your only concern, you could end up with a disreputable host whose reputation and practices harm your site.